Valve: “Family Sharing” for up to 10 devices coming to Steam

Only one device can actively share at any time, however.

Valve today announced that it will launch a Family Sharing feature to allow Steam users to share their game libraries with other accounts on up to 10 additional devices.

Steam Family Sharing, which will launch in a private beta in mid-September, lets users share their entire library with up to 10 devices rather than sharing individual games. Only one person can play any game from the shared library at any given time, meaning you can't use your own Steam account while someone else is actively sharing in it. This limitation makes Family Sharing somewhat similar to simply giving someone else access to your Steam library by sharing your username and password. However, this way there's no risk to your account details or e-commerce information in the process.

Steam users can share access either by enabling it in their account settings or by responding to requests to share sent by other Steam users. Borrowers will still be limited by regional restrictions on the original game, and lenders can have sharing privileges taken away if a borrower is caught engaging in cheating or fraud. All DLC purchased by the lender will be available to the borrower, but Valve warns that some games "that require an additional third-party key, account, or subscription" may not be shareable.

Steam's Family Sharing plan is very similar to a plan Microsoft originally discussed for the all-digital ecosystem initially planned for the Xbox One. That plan, whose details were always quite vague, was eventually scrapped when Microsoft backtracked on its game licensing plans. Still, Microsoft has been makingnoise about introducing a "hybrid" model sometime in the future, which would allow for sharing features on downloaded libraries while keeping disc-based games distinct and unshareable.

I think the point people are missing is that this only benefits a select amount of people. Valve is making an ability to share your library with another user so they can get credit for achievements and such. That is all this does.

This is effectively the same as if you were to share the same computer for game playing with multiple family members. Instead of sharing the same account and one account racking up achievements, this allows individuals with other steam accounts on the computer to play the games purchased in one library and gain achievements for it.

Other usages would involve forfeiting your time with your library while a registered device's user is playing your library.

Well, not exactly. With discs, you share a game, and you can't play that game. What this system appears to be is if you share one game, you can't play ANY game.

So it would be akin to saying that if you loan out one disc, all your other discs are locked until you get that original disc back. That's not really analogous to "sharing" in the traditional sense (then again, you're sharing rights, not physical objects.

“Our customers have expressed a desire to share their digital games among friends and family members, just as current retail games, books, DVDs, and other physical media can be shared,” explained Anna Sweet of Valve. “Family Sharing was created in direct response to these user requests.

Yes, this is totally how it works in real life. Whenever I share a BluRay disc with one of my friends I'm not able to access any of my other BluRay discs until the shared disc is returned.

This is so close to being an amazing feature, but the arbitrary restrictions Valve is putting up definitely take away from its usefulness to consumers. I totally agree with only allowing one copy of the game to be run at a time, but one copy of the entire library? Locking up a game library in its entirety to share a single game is incredibly heavy handed. I understand that game publishers aren't going to want people passing around a single copy of a game, but this can still happen with the current restrictions - it's just a more annoying process for everyone involved.

This was probably a hard sell for Valve in the first place, but game publishers should accept this kind of sharing as a "lesser of two evils" kind of situation. If they don't, well the cracked copy of that game is only a few mouse clicks away...

What an awesome idea! Microsoft should enable this! /sarcasm (Still upset that the haters made MS change course on this)

If they had just restricted it to digital download games at first there'd have been no blowback. Forcing it on disc based games was something people were justified in hating given the drawbacks.

Presenting it as an all or nothing proposition was a terrible mistake on their part. A big objection was the DRM needed to get third party publishers to participate was a problem for a portion of the market that doesn't have reliable broadband service. The example of military personnel deployed in locations where they'd have little or no connectivity or any connectivity would be reserved for non-recreational purposes.

A very small portion of the market but huge as bad PR goes.

If the sharing feature and the associated DRM requirement had been instead presented as a opt-in program, the reception would have been very different and could have been a big win instead of a black eye.

This has been happening to Microsoft a lot lately. They don't think through the consequences or even after much negative feedback go ahead and do the wrong thing anyways. If Windows had been delayed a few months to allow more configuration to accommodate those wanting a traditional desktop, it could have been a huge success in the established market while making in-roads to the growing mobile sector. Instead they made something that didn't get it right for either audience.

This is completely useless. Lose access to 194 other games so someone can play the one remaining game? No thanks.I'll keep having steam instances in offline mode on 2 out of the 3 computers in my home, thank you very much.And I'll be trying to get my stuff from GoG.com so I don't have to deal with this in the future.

Well, not exactly. With discs, you share a game, and you can't play that game. What this system appears to be is if you share one game, you can't play ANY game.

So it would be akin to saying that if you loan out one disc, all your other discs are locked until you get that original disc back. That's not really analogous to "sharing" in the traditional sense (then again, you're sharing rights, not physical objects.

This just applies the Steam law of "you can only have one game on one Steam account active at one time" but adds "other people can access some of your games as well as you being able to".

I guess it does have ONE advantage actually.If you have two computers in your house, you can have your "real" Steam account on one, and a "fake" Steam account on the other.You can then log in to both accounts, and share the real games to the fake account, and have two Steam accounts logged in on two computers at the same time, and be able to update games on one computer while playing on another.Currently you can't do something like that, and would have to log out of one if you were doing something on the other, which means if you have more than one gaming computer you get messed about because of Steam's restrictive settings (and yes, it's 100% Steam and not publishers in the current case of not letting simultaneous LOGINS TO STEAM TO DOWNLOAD UPDATES).

“Our customers have expressed a desire to share their digital games among friends and family members, just as current retail games, books, DVDs, and other physical media can be shared,” explained Anna Sweet of Valve. “Family Sharing was created in direct response to these user requests.

Yes, this is totally how it works in real life. Whenever I share a BluRay disc with one of my friends I'm not able to access any of my other BluRay discs until the shared disc is returned.

This is so close to being an amazing feature, but the arbitrary restrictions Valve is putting up definitely take away from its usefulness to consumers. I totally agree with only allowing one copy of the game to be run at a time, but one copy of the entire library? Locking up a game library in its entirety to share a single game is incredibly heavy handed. I understand that game publishers aren't going to want people passing around a single copy of a game, but this can still happen with the current restrictions - it's just a more annoying process for everyone involved.

This was probably a hard sell for Valve in the first place, but game publishers should accept this kind of sharing as a "lesser of two evils" kind of situation. If they don't, well the cracked copy of that game is only a few mouse clicks away...

They aren't locking the library though. You can play your games whenever you want, if a shared account is playing it, they will be asked to purchase the game or save their game and quit.

It's not bad it's just not everything we want for sharing our games....

But do consider that we didn't have anything before and I rather have the possibility of sharing my Steam games whilst not playing them than having to give out my credentials or password etc... I don't give anyone any password unless really necessary and this way I don't have to... Trust never works anyway...

And can let some of my friends try out some games I found great before they buy them themselves, since they might not agree with me...

I do however want to be"admin" of this of course so if I want to play (my games) I can tell my friend/s to shutdown the game in 5min (etc) or else I will...

This is so close to being an amazing feature, but the arbitrary restrictions Valve is putting up ...

I said it when Microsoft was the company in question, and I'll say it again here: VALVE is very, very unlikely to be the one issuing the restrictions.

The people who own the rights to that game, the ones that let Valve sell their wares-- those are the people who are most likely setting restrictions on your usage. Both Valve and Microsoft are negotiating from a position of weakness, since they don't hold the rights to the game.

Valve seems to be going for people using the same computer, not a cross-country sharing package like microsoft was trying. Still, they each have some pretty tight restrictions on them. Ones they likely wish weren't there.

Wouldn't this be better implemented by just letting you lend individual games to people? Why can't I lend, say, Dungeon Defenders to someone, and then it becomes accessible to them, but inaccessible to me--but I can still play all my other games.

With this method, it would remain somewhat annoying to abuse the system, because lending would be done on an individual game-to-person basis. Anyone who wanted to be a game-sharing tycoon would have to manage an unwieldy amount of lending.

Alternatively, maybe let you designate 3-5 people as family members. Maybe even charge a FEE (omg!) for the privilege of doing so. Make it so you can't change family members often (e.g. you can't remove them as family for six months?) However, once you've established your family, sharing between everyone would be more liberal.

The solution is obvious. Simply make a new Steam account for every game you buy. That way you can share it however you like. You can even have one other account just for your friends list. Sure you'll miss out on trading cards or potatoes or whatever, but most people don't care too much about those anyway. I don't know if Steam restricts a credit card from being associated with more than one account, but you can avoid this problem by using the friends list account to do all of the purchases and make them gifts to the proper account.

The only utility I see from this is a better enabling of sneaker-net downloads. My family plays video games when when get together, but with Satellite internet, getting patches past caps can be interesting. This would help that immensely.

With an account lockout for sharing, this can not be billed as family sharing. Allow the use of different licenses on different machines and it would be perfect. Hell, this could lead to the possibility of buying multiple licenses for a game per account (hint, hint valve).

The first thing I thought when I saw this was "sweet, now when my buddy X buys game Y, I won't have to because I'll just borrow it when she's done playing," and I bet a lot of you did too. Which is why it isn't happening. It would be really nice if Valve could somehow differentiate you sharing with your wife (who wouldn't her own copy) and your buddy (who would), they can't and we'd all abuse the hell out of a system like that, so they're not offering one. This is so you can both play on the same computer, but have different friends lists and achievements, not so you can stop buying games and leech off your friends. And for that population, I'm sure this is a nice feature.

So we have a system where purchased games (whether they are purchased as physical copies or digital copies) are tied to an account and can't be re-sold, but you can authorize sharing to certain friend's devices, but only one friend can play at a time. I seem to recall two months ago that such a scheme was considered "anti-consumer".

There's a difference between applying this to digital purchases and applying it to physical purchases. When applying this to digital, it gives a user more freedom than they had before. When applying it to physical, it gives a user less.

There's also a difference between an open platform and a "walled garden". That one, I'll leave as an exercise to the reader.

The first thing I thought when I saw this was "sweet, now when my buddy X buys game Y, I won't have to because I'll just borrow it when she's done playing," and I bet a lot of you did too. Which is why it isn't happening. It would be really nice if Valve could somehow differentiate you sharing with your wife (who wouldn't her own copy) and your buddy (who would), they can't and we'd all abuse the hell out of a system like that, so they're not offering one. This is so you can both play on the same computer, but have different friends lists and achievements, not so you can stop buying games and leech off your friends. And for that population, I'm sure this is a nice feature.

How is this any different than borrowing the DVD from a buddy when he's done playing a game?

The solution is obvious. Simply make a new Steam account for every game you buy. That way you can share it however you like. You can even have one other account just for your friends list. Sure you'll miss out on trading cards or potatoes or whatever, but most people don't care too much about those anyway. I don't know if Steam restricts a credit card from being associated with more than one account, but you can avoid this problem by using the friends list account to do all of the purchases and make them gifts to the proper account.

This sounds horribly inconvenient. I could not care less about achievements and the like, but the idea of having 20 different logins seems god awful.

The first thing I thought when I saw this was "sweet, now when my buddy X buys game Y, I won't have to because I'll just borrow it when she's done playing," and I bet a lot of you did too. Which is why it isn't happening. It would be really nice if Valve could somehow differentiate you sharing with your wife (who wouldn't her own copy) and your buddy (who would), they can't and we'd all abuse the hell out of a system like that, so they're not offering one. This is so you can both play on the same computer, but have different friends lists and achievements, not so you can stop buying games and leech off your friends. And for that population, I'm sure this is a nice feature.

Well, family is relatively permanent. They could say you have 4 family slots where you can share game to game, but those cannot be changed. Then you have infinite slots that work in the crappy way they announced today.

The first thing I thought when I saw this was "sweet, now when my buddy X buys game Y, I won't have to because I'll just borrow it when she's done playing," and I bet a lot of you did too. Which is why it isn't happening. It would be really nice if Valve could somehow differentiate you sharing with your wife (who wouldn't her own copy) and your buddy (who would), they can't and we'd all abuse the hell out of a system like that, so they're not offering one. This is so you can both play on the same computer, but have different friends lists and achievements, not so you can stop buying games and leech off your friends. And for that population, I'm sure this is a nice feature.

How is this any different than borrowing the DVD from a buddy when he's done playing a game?

Well, because typically when you borrow a DVD from a buddy, he's not giving you his DVD player and his whole DVD library along with it to hold onto while you watch that one DVD.

The first thing I thought when I saw this was "sweet, now when my buddy X buys game Y, I won't have to because I'll just borrow it when she's done playing," and I bet a lot of you did too. Which is why it isn't happening. It would be really nice if Valve could somehow differentiate you sharing with your wife (who wouldn't her own copy) and your buddy (who would), they can't and we'd all abuse the hell out of a system like that, so they're not offering one. This is so you can both play on the same computer, but have different friends lists and achievements, not so you can stop buying games and leech off your friends. And for that population, I'm sure this is a nice feature.

How is this any different than borrowing the DVD from a buddy when he's done playing a game?

Well, because typically when you borrow a DVD from a buddy, he's not giving you his DVD player and his whole DVD library along with it to hold onto while you watch that one DVD.

Doesn't the PS3 already do this? I buy all of the games in our family and my wife and I have our own PSN accounts but share the same PS3. She's able to play all the games I buy both retail and digital, and we both keep track of trophies, friends, etc...

Doesn't the PS3 already do this? I buy all of the games in our family and my wife and I have our own PSN accounts but share the same PS3. She's able to play all the games I buy both retail and digital, and we both keep track of trophies, friends, etc...

Pretty much this is how it works, but except being limited to one device, it is limited to one account shared across devices.

Ok. So the problem they're trying to fix is maybe something like a dad having a bunch of games and his two sons playing games under his account with a shared friends list among all of them because they have just one computer and don't want to buy the games three times. So now each son and the dad can make their own account and friends list and the dad can grant the two other accounts access to the library. That way one of the son's friends knows when that particular son is online instead of someone in the household.

The solution is obvious. Simply make a new Steam account for every game you buy. That way you can share it however you like. You can even have one other account just for your friends list. Sure you'll miss out on trading cards or potatoes or whatever, but most people don't care too much about those anyway. I don't know if Steam restricts a credit card from being associated with more than one account, but you can avoid this problem by using the friends list account to do all of the purchases and make them gifts to the proper account.

This is brilliant.

Except, share the games from the ALT account with your main account when you play it. Once you are done, share the game to a friend and games on your main account will still work, since the game was on the ALT account.

Leaving each game account laying dormant, you never login except to share with others.

For single player games that you only play once off, this seems like a reasonable system.

Hell, maybe we should create a website of log-in credentials for the ALT accounts like a public library system. Users submit the account to the website, the website indexes the games on the account and then automates the account connections to other users for you without ever giving the password out to anyone else.

And since you transferred the game to the account by gift, there is no credit card information exposed.

Doesn't the PS3 already do this? I buy all of the games in our family and my wife and I have our own PSN accounts but share the same PS3. She's able to play all the games I buy both retail and digital, and we both keep track of trophies, friends, etc...

Pretty much this is how it works, but except being limited to one device, it is limited to one account shared across devices.

I'd much rather see a system where I could loan out up to 10 games, each to only one person at a time, and only be able to "check out" something like 3 games at a time. The lender would then reserve the right to revoke the loan at any time, and only one person is allowed to play each specific game concurrently. Then, as far as any publisher needs to be concerned, this is tantamount to lending a physical copy of the game to your friend.

How the hell are so many people upset about this. Nothing was taken away, and a feature was added. If you don't like it, you don't have to use it. But I am sure there are people who will like it, and now they have it!

What is the problem here? Oh, that's right: you didn't get everything you wanted, so the fact that you were given anything at all is upsetting.

The solution is obvious. Simply make a new Steam account for every game you buy. That way you can share it however you like. You can even have one other account just for your friends list. Sure you'll miss out on trading cards or potatoes or whatever, but most people don't care too much about those anyway. I don't know if Steam restricts a credit card from being associated with more than one account, but you can avoid this problem by using the friends list account to do all of the purchases and make them gifts to the proper account.

This sounds horribly inconvenient. I could not care less about achievements and the like, but the idea of having 20 different logins seems god awful.

A little, but you could make it reasonable by using the same password for every account and making the account names something like glap1922-Portal and glap1922-GoneHome. You would have to keep track of all of your games separately, or you might forget which ones you've bought already. DLC might be a problem too, dunno how easy it is to gift DLC.

This system would allow someone to effectively resell a game though. Just change the password on the account and you can give it to anybody. I'm starting to feel like a chump for putting all of my games on the same account now.

If it's just too many games, you could create bundles. Like if you have all of the XCOM games, you could put them all in a single account. Same with Doom or any other franchise. In fact if you buy them as a bundle this might be unavoidable.

This is so close to being an amazing feature, but the arbitrary restrictions Valve is putting up ...

I said it when Microsoft was the company in question, and I'll say it again here: VALVE is very, very unlikely to be the one issuing the restrictions.

The people who own the rights to that game, the ones that let Valve sell their wares-- those are the people who are most likely setting restrictions on your usage. Both Valve and Microsoft are negotiating from a position of weakness, since they don't hold the rights to the game.

Valve seems to be going for people using the same computer, not a cross-country sharing package like microsoft was trying. Still, they each have some pretty tight restrictions on them. Ones they likely wish weren't there.

Why is Valve unlikely to be the one issuing the restrictions?Valve are the ones who issue the restrictions like if you have two entirely unrelated games from different publishers on one Steam account, you can only log in to that Steam account once on one computer and only run one game at a time.

Valve have a history of making restrictions that don't exist from the publisher, so why would you assume any different in this case?If I bought an Oblivion DVD copy, I could use it on any computer I wanted whenever I wanted.If I had two computers, and I had Oblivion and Borderlands, I could do whatever I wanted with the discs, including running both games at the same time on two different computers.

If I bought both of those games on Steam, I would be able to run one of the two games on any one computer, and if I tried to even just log in to Steam on another computer I would be kicked out of my Steam account.

Tell me, why would I ever assume the publisher is behind restrictions on what I can and can't do with games on my Steam account, rather than assuming Valve is the one putting in the restrictions?

How the hell are so many people upset about this. Nothing was taken away, and a feature was added. If you don't like it, you don't have to use it. But I am sure there are people who will like it, and now they have it!

What is the problem here? Oh, that's right: you didn't get everything you wanted, so the fact that you were given anything at all is upsetting.

They arent giving anything but a new UI for an existing workaround with a crippling restriction. If I want to share my library with my wife she can just sign in as me, download games and one of us will go offline and play. My library is already shared. All this new element does is what I was already doing, but it kicks one of us off in the process. That isn't an additional feature, its a downgrade from a method already in use. Now if we could both play but just be restricted to not playing the same game at the same time that would be just peachy.

How the hell are so many people upset about this. Nothing was taken away, and a feature was added. If you don't like it, you don't have to use it. But I am sure there are people who will like it, and now they have it!

What is the problem here? Oh, that's right: you didn't get everything you wanted, so the fact that you were given anything at all is upsetting.

Because this feature is completely useless for, you know, family sharing? As in, multiple computer families which all want to play a different game at the same time?

How the hell are so many people upset about this. Nothing was taken away, and a feature was added. If you don't like it, you don't have to use it. But I am sure there are people who will like it, and now they have it!

What is the problem here? Oh, that's right: you didn't get everything you wanted, so the fact that you were given anything at all is upsetting.

They arent giving anything but a new UI for an existing workaround with a crippling restriction. If I want to share my library with my wife she can just sign in as me, download games and one of us will go offline and play. My library is already shared. All this new element does is what I was already doing, but it kicks one of us off in the process. That isn't an additional feature, its a downgrade from a method already in use. Now if we could both play but just be restricted to not playing the same game at the same time that would be just peachy.

Then, as far as any publisher needs to be concerned, this is tantamount to lending a physical copy of the game to your friend.

It should be pointed out that as far as publishers are concerned, lending your game to your friend is no different than pulling a gun on the publisher and taking their wallet. Every time you lent a CD or DVD to a friend, you were committing a crime, it says so right there in the EULA on every game ever. Granted, publishers never tried to enforce this because they knew someone might mumble something about the Doctrine of First Sale and turn it into a Supreme Court case that they could very well lose, so they've instead gone to great pains to insure that digital platforms have technological restrictions in place to prevent it from ever coming up.

How the hell are so many people upset about this. Nothing was taken away, and a feature was added. If you don't like it, you don't have to use it. But I am sure there are people who will like it, and now they have it!

What is the problem here? Oh, that's right: you didn't get everything you wanted, so the fact that you were given anything at all is upsetting.

They arent giving anything but a new UI for an existing workaround with a crippling restriction. If I want to share my library with my wife she can just sign in as me, download games and one of us will go offline and play. My library is already shared. All this new element does is what I was already doing, but it kicks one of us off in the process. That isn't an additional feature, its a downgrade from a method already in use. Now if we could both play but just be restricted to not playing the same game at the same time that would be just peachy.

Kyle Orland / Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in Pittsburgh, PA.